At high altitudes the wind is usually much greater. Floating/flying wind generators are possible but the possibility of a cable breaking and cutting a huge line in the landscape below has kept them from being used.

There are certain physical limits to what GE can do. Plants store sugar and other nutrients to cover their own future growth (asparagus, tapioca) provide for their offspring (potatoes, corn) or get animals to disperse their offspring (tomatoes, apples) by being tasty.

A plant that had to do all of those things at the same time would grow very slowly and produce small amounts of each type of edible tissue. Energy (sugar) out must be less than energy (sunlight) in, same as in physics.

Back on topic: Yes, the 21st century is an ecological trainwreck. No you and I can’t fix it. Yes there is a more and a less responsible way to do it. Yes humanity will have to pay for all its sins sooner or later.

Note: North Africa was a fertile prairie up until the end of the Pleistocene era. Then we moved in and now it’s a desert. H. Sapiens being a “weed” is not a new problem.

My original idea of a full service marina located offshore of a major city servicing pleasure craft appealed to me only because I wasted my youth in the hospitality industry and know the profit margins are high.

Of course the commercial fishermen and other pros that a floating dry-dock would serve care only about the bottom line but I do not see why fuel (for example) would be more expensive there than on shore. We avoid taxes, import tariffs and a lot of complications if we can just get a tanker to stop by our place before they deliver the bulk of their cargo to the mainland we might even be able to undercut the less convenient refueling available onshore. It is one of the important limitations on commercial fishermen that they have a designated “season” for each type of catch. To save them a trip back to land for refueling or repairs during that season could mean a lot of money for them.

So I see two possibilities: A) The party barge w/ fuel pump and beer on tap and B) The floating “truck stop” that serves the fishing industry. Both could take advantage of not paying a government taxes and both could save money by offering opportunity to skilled workers from anywhere on the globe.

So, both A and B pay a little more for a new fuel pump or fresh tomatoes to go on the burgers and both pay a little less for diesel and labor.

As a guy whose paycheck depends on staying under budget I like the way this is looking.

When I was a student and this was all near-term science fiction the biggest worry was the viral vector itself.

The virus changed to change other critter’s DNA is still there after it does its job. The only time this has been an obvious problem so far is with the monarch butterflies. The monarch only lays its eggs on milkweed plants and milkweed loves the kind of fences farmers put up. Biotech corn, enhanced with natural insecticides taken from other plants has transferred its manmade bug proofing to the milkweed in some areas. Hench the population of Monarch butterflies has crashed.

So, it’s not just the possible impact of the engineered species itself but the possibility of changing the things that eat it or even just live near it.

So I understand your concern however I got some bad news or at least a pessimistic opinion.

It is already too late to worry about it.

Soybeans built by Monsanto already outnumber soybeans built by nature. This is the post-soybean era. The economic incentive to keep creating these Frankinveggies and the humanitarian impulse to feed the starving are not going to go away.

Genetic engineering is here to stay.

Yes there will be problems but frankly any organism that does not serve or please man was not going to last another 1,000 years no matter what.

EDIT: I bet you 20 to 1 those super salmon replace baseline salmon in short order. Sorry salmon.

My first thought was that I don’t think I have ever seen anyone spend so much hypothetical money in a single post.

I honestly think that a seastead as a political sancuary is a very good idea. If you want to get BIG donations then get some world-wide press when your seastead provides a refuge that someone uses to escape a genocide.

Of course the next step is telling them “Well, you can either stay here and clean fish or we can drop you off within rafting distance of some more stable country.”

Off topic: elspru’s storm map inspired this:

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The white ovals are (roughly) the ocean gyres. South atlantic looks really trouble free. Also, there are shallow spots on the eastern edge of it. Of course it is also located between the two poorest continents on earth.

2, We are constantly being pounded with energy we didn’t ask for in the form of wind, waves, currents extreme temperature changes and relentless sunlight.

Consider a field of small wave generators tethered to each other so that they encircle an area. Call it the wave attenuation zone. They would milk some of the energy out of the waves and convert it to a form we could make use of. Could they possibly generate enough to provide for their own position control? I don’t think I am trying to “sail into the wind” here, the waves are formed by action of the wind over a large area of water and all I am doing is using the motion of a small object bobbing up and down to generate electric current. The electronics to provide automated position control are cheap these days. If you connected them in groups with some semi-rigid strut only one positioning motor per group would be necessary

Imagine units small enough for one man to lift into a boat and spaced about a half meter apart. Place enough units outside the breakwall and you can have several chances to get some free power and dampen the waves between the raw sea and the breakwall.

Disadvantages: the whole thing would need to be reeled in before a big storm or found and untangled after one. Since they are all connected to one with a motor you could send them a radio command to “come inside”

. The individual generators would have to be pretty maintenance free but wave generators with 1 moving part are possible.

Some of the EM field would leak into the surrounding water and seacrete might want to form on the outside of the generators.

Alan desktop fabrication is still decades off I think. At least I hope; Economists talk about “disruptive technologies” desktop fabrication, even the most modest kinds would be downright catastrophic for pretty much all extant industries. It would be pretty much the end of the world as we know it economically. A very good thing in the end but slow change is good change.

The diner plate seastead is my favorite idea yet. Not scalable but perfect in so many ways. One suggested modification? Raise the outer wall up 30-40 meters and you will never get your lawn soaked in salt water.

EDIT: the plate and submerged tower are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Put industrial space on the bottom, commercial space above that, residential space, schools etc. there they can get a little indirect sunlight and a big shared garden/park on top for everybody.

Maybe one of the best ways to avoid opressive tendencies in seasteading would be to develop a neigborhood culture of “giving free shelter to the opressed running away” – this would be a similar code to the “ancient hospitality code” of nomadic tribes – so the opressive seastead, whenever having contact to the “outer world” would loose people until the problem is finally solved by unsostainability of the opressive regim – the berlin wall fell this way .

Wil

And here I thought your genius was purely mechanical/physical.

Here in the US our ancestors learned that a slave society is impossible without popular support or more accurately, an underground railroad is easy with popular support.

In the dessert state of Arizona (also here in the US) it is still illegal to deny anyone a drink of water. This of course goes back to the founding days when lives were lost for want of a sip and common decency dictated that to refuse someone a drink was the same as murder.

A seasteading culture that shunned all those who shunned refuges is the best answer I can see.

That is to say I am posting only to keep this thread at the top of the “recent posts” list because I consider its content worthy of attention.

Since I have no actual content to add allow me to say that while large gas tanks are perfect many discarded objects (shipping containers, wooden dressers, mattresses, refrigerators and telemarketers) could be covered with an inch thickness of concrete and be used in the same way.